As a chemical engineer who loves programming just as much, I have had some thoughts about bioengineering for a while now. Part of the problem is that the immen

As a chemical engineer who loves programming just as much, I have had some thoughts about bioengineering for a while now. Part of the problem is that the immense complexity involved in living organisms is unpredictable, even with today's computing technology. Human-engineered circuits are easy to predict; they were designed in a way that made the most sense. With biology however, something that appears to be working may have a completely unrelated side effect that isn't noticed until decades later, or even something so bizarre that it isn't noticed until hundreds of years later in future generations. The way we currently find treatments (grossly oversimplifying) is to grab some substance that looks like it might work, test it in animals, test it in humans, wait a while to make sure nothing really bad happened, and then prescribe it as a drug. If computers get advanced enough, I would much prefer the case where all of these interactions are fully simulated. You can go through millions of variations of substances all while tracking every change they make to each part of the virtual organism. Obviously, this is a VERY long way off, but it would be nice because we wouldn't have to worry about unknown side effects. Of course, our current way is the best we've got, and it saves millions of lives each year, so while there may be some future risk, we're doing the best we can. *On a somewhat related note, I've always thought it would be cool to have programmable blood filters. In other words, you could essentially provide the type of molecule or cell you are looking to trap, and then something like a ccd would either redirect it or let it pass through.